Fondation Chanel chief on the scent for new partners

To be beautiful is not a goal, but for Miren Bengoa, executive director of Fondation Chanel, “by feeling beautiful a woman feels empowered.” Women’s empowerment is the clear mission of the French fashion house’s corporate foundation. Launched in 2011, it has worked quite discreetly over the past four years. “We needed to identify a number of partnerships and see them through before we publicized the existence of the foundation,” Bengoa told Devex in Paris, on the sidelines of the Convergences Forum where she spoke in a panel addressing the development potential of vulnerable populations. Managed by a staff of just three people, the foundation is working on 20 projects in 15 countries, focused on development rather than humanitarian aid projects. “That is key for one reason,” said Bengoa. “We want to monitor the projects quite closely and to visit them, so we decided that for a corporate foundation it wasn’t appropriate to go to emergency fields or to unstable countries.” Chanel has set about 20 partnerships with international and nongovernmental organizations, as well as social businesses and aims at keeping a “very diverse portfolio” of projects on its books. The foundation’s policy, Bengoa explained, is not to launch frequent calls for proposals, but rather to seek out partners through its contact network, or through direct applications for funding via its website. The level of investment on offer is a “confidential matter,” the executive director explained, but Bengoa revealed that Chanel is hoping to increase its funding in future. What is key, she said, is to stay true to the foundation’s strategy of providing funding that is “significant to the project,” rather than simply complementing funds from other donors. “In France, it has truly been a shift of mindset, since many foundations tend to work through calls for proposals with smaller and short-term amounts, whereas we decided the opposite, to go for longer term and more significant amounts,” she said. In an exclusive interview, the woman who has led Fondation Chanel since its inception gave Devex the inside track on the challenges she faced in setting up the organization and outlined her vision for the future. Here are some excerpts from that conversation: What were the main challenges you faced when establishing the foundation and how did you overcome them? The challenges that we faced were mainly internal. Many big corporate brands in France have set up foundations before, but for us it has been a remarkable move towards social engagement within the company, to work with our own employees and making sure that they feel involved […]. It has been a challenge, but mainly because there is a perception that people that work in the luxury sector do not necessarily feel very comfortable looking into issues of poverty, women’s rights and so on. We have worked very actively to make sure that on both sides we can build bridges and we can build an understanding. That has so far been quite successful. We feel very happy to be supporting projects in the long run and in that way we get to know the projects much better, we get to know the implementers and we try to build an additional layer of confidence that runs beyond funding. For us, funding alone is not enough. We sincerely hope that by partnering with our foundation, project holders, NGOs or social businesses will have extra support. That can come at the beginning when we design the projects, or it can come during the implementation, since we also propose technical support from our staff in many different areas. It is interesting to see that the same skills that apply for the luxury sector also work in any other sector. … What have been the main lessons learned since the launch of the foundation? For me the big lesson is that you have to commit in the long run if you want to be a good partner, giving project holders a clear overview of what type of funding is available and for what purpose. The other lesson that I have shared with my executive board is that we very much need to be able to fund operational costs: we cannot just be focused on a very narrow definition of project implementation, especially in the area that we want to support, namely capacity building and training. There’s obviously going to be funding required for staff and for the mobility of these staff, as well as monitoring and evaluation. Those are budget lined that we are very much open now to funding, which may not have been so obvious in the beginning. And any personal challenges in leading the foundation that you’ve had to overcome? There have been many challenges and many amazing stories to tell, because I have shifted from being UNICEF staff to managing this foundation. It is really interesting to change your perspective from being an implementer to becoming a donor and on that side I think I have learned a lot: learning to be a good donor, not somebody who provides funding but then irrational requests, irrational reporting requirements or excessive or untimely reporting requirements. I do have a sense of what it is like to be implementing a program and needing to be focused on your beneficiaries rather than on the donors. As mentioned, it has been a huge change within the company itself. First, having a foundation and then talking about that, making sure that people understand what is about, why it exists. So, I have done a lot internal work and presentations, not to convince, but at least convey the importance of building this social link from the company towards to the outside world. So what was your strategy to clearly convey this message within the company? The priority issue was that Chanel decided to focus exclusively on women’s empowerment, which is great because the foundation has a clear mission. We are not confusing people by saying we do a little bit of art, a little bit of sport, a little bit of this, a little bit of that. We are very much focused on women’s empowerment, which leads us to try to build that expertise as well ... What has been needed internally was to convey, first of all, a broader awareness of the situation faced by women in the world. I think people were very blind to the vulnerabilities that are still out there, the huge inequalities and the fact that the private sector can do something about them. What kind of partnerships are you building? And what are you looking for in your prospective partners? We have quite stringent selection criteria when getting involved with our NGOs. The idea is to fund projects that are either social innovations, that demonstrate something novel [or] that have not been funded before. It could be a pilot project that could be replicated, or we could also fund projects that have an already proven impact that we want replicated in other areas. What do we expect from our partners? Mainly that they are serious and know their business. We have discovered over time that of course you have a lots of NGOs that have already embedded a gender sensitivity, a gender awareness into their programming, but that is not the case everywhere. We still find a lot of NGOs who in their many areas of intervention, be they economic empowerment, agriculture, or environmental issues, still lack a gender focus. That is something we want to push, because we are convinced that women’s empowerment is at the heart of development and growth. Why the decision not to have frequent calls for proposals? In order to initiate our funding or grant-making in a way that would be quite balanced, we decided to prospect directly in the areas and subtopics that we want to focus on. Those areas were entrepreneurship and financial independence; education and training; participation and leadership; and capacity building. These priorities will also evolve in future years, but we decided to proactively build the portfolio through networking and contacts. As soon as we created the website, a lot of people came to us. We also explained our mission and our criteria to a number of other stakeholders, involving other foundations and global institutions who could then refer projects to us. What are your selection criteria? You mentioned that you are looking for innovative projects, but what exactly do you mean by “innovative”? We have been learning by doing. Our criteria are very much standardized: a project should be sustainable, relevant, based on data, on a good awareness of the context. The ability to explain is also important — some organizations know the context, but are not able to translate that into their documentation. We always ask for quite a detailed context analysis. The innovation part is key, but it is not mandatory. We don’t necessary only look for the big innovators, we are very interested in the replication of good practices and being able to highlight and transfer those good practices from one continent to another. Knowledge management is very central to our work. The foundation aims at maintaining a very diverse portfolio of partners. Why? Because of the knowledge that can be shared among these different-sized partners. Large institutions also don’t necessarily need as much involvement and technical assistance than other smaller, more novel associations and groups. ... We will continue to explore partnerships everywhere, especially in the United States because we are still lagging behind in our funding there for many reasons, but we are looking at developing our activities there. Check out more insights and analysis for global development leaders like you, and sign up as an Executive Member to receive the information you need for your organization to thrive.